Car park owner plans for world where vehicles drive themselves

HERE’s a vision of motoring that ought to make all car park operators’ blood run cold.

Every morning, your automated car drives you to work. It drops you off and drives home on its own, so you don’t need to fight for a parking space. Implausible? Not according to Ben Ziff. Britain’s car parks are in desperate need of a sunnier, customer-friendly image. We’ve all got horror stories about car parks where most mortals would fear to tread, and few cars leave unscathed.

Mr Ziff is the managing director of Citipark; the new name for Town Centre Car Parks, which is part of Town Centre Securities (TCS). He wants to build a business with impeccable green credentials.

He’s already installed a giant solar farm at the company’s Clarence Dock car park in Leeds, and sees opportunities for growth across the UK and Ireland. Understandably, Mr Ziff feels a powerful affinity with TCS, the property investment and development company which was founded by his late grandfather Arnold Ziff.

His biggest challenge is diversifying Citipark’s income as the UK economy motors towards happier times. The business is being re-built. TCS’s car parking business, Universal Parking once owned 23,000 car parking spaces. It was sold to Dutch-owned Q Park in 2001.

Mr Ziff, who joined TCS as an assistant asset manager in 2008, has overseen the rebirth of the car parking business and its re-branding as CitiPark. He understands the value of eye-catching stunts. In 2013, Mr Ziff attracted plenty of column inches with help from bucket-loads of conkers.

Thanks to Mr Ziff, two busy Leeds city centre car parks – The Merrion Centre and Clarence Dock – allowed drivers to pay for parking using horse chestnuts. Town Centre Car Parks, as the company was then known, told customers one conker would buy them 20p’s worth of car parking. However, when he talks about his business plans, Mr Ziff is in deadly earnest.

He said: “The next step for me is probably hitting Northern Ireland soon and also Scotland. In five years’ time, I’d probably like to be at least double the size we are now, if not more. Currently, we have 7,000 spaces. I definitely want to be about 15,000 spaces by then in the CitiPark business.”

He joined the business at a time when the global economy was falling off a cliff.

“TCS has been through an extremely tough time over the last five years,’’ Mr Ziff said. “I certainly will go through another recession in my lifetime. It’s a family business and we don’t intend that to change.

“Like all other property companies, we weren’t in control of the value of our assets. While you’re in control of your own destiny, you’re not in control of what the market’s doing.”

He wants to make the business stronger by increasing its scale and embracing green energy systems. The cars of the future may well be able to motor along without human intervention, which will take the sector into unknown territory.

“It is going to become a complete game changer when vehicles become automated and driverless,’’ he said.

In the brave ne